decode and encode in Python

encode -> create a str
decode -> create a unicode str

In addition, you can't print a unicode string + "\n" together. This will confuse python program and fire an error.

print unicode string
print "\n"

This is ok.

This is because you can't print a unicode directly. To see if a string is a unicode string, print type(test_string). If it is a unicode string, you must print that by using test_string.encode("utf-8")